6 July 2023
So What Now?
Our restricted future.
By Lynda Goetz
From a personal point of view, June has been a wonderful month: the weather has been fantastic; the garden has never looked so good; my long term-partner and I had a magical wedding; my first grandchild is due in September; and we have acquired a new puppy. So, lots of joy and plenty to look forward to. From a wider perspective, however, I, like many others, have a sense of doom and foreboding about the future. There is very little feeling of optimism, even amongst the young and that is surely not a good thing.
That lack of belief in the future may be something which has been there at other times, historically, but perhaps more often the mood of the young has been forward-looking and hopeful. It now feels gloomy, grim and grey. There seems so much to worry about. By general consensus it would seem that climate change and the entire future of the human race head the agenda. Increased population and dwindling resources are also a matter to consider. Then there is the fear of AI and how we humans will cope with that. Is our future destined to be as humanoids, with implants in our brains to ‘improve’ us? If not, will the machines simply decide to dispense with us? On a less existential level, there is the war in Ukraine and our future relations with Russia, and even more worryingly with China. Migration issues around the world are also a concern which is likely to get worse rather than better in the coming years. Here in the UK we seem to be increasingly in thrall to a strange minority comprised of those in charge of our essential institutions and a younger generation which will brook no opposition to or discussion about currently fashionable views.
A lack of knowledge or understanding of history seems to be at the root of some of our problems. Those busily trying to ‘decolonise’ our museums and re-educate our workers appear, for a start, not to recognise the difference between our history and that of America. Ever since the murder of George Floyd and the rise of The Black Lives Matter movement, anyone who has tried to point this out has been vilified and attacked, even, in many cases if they were black (when they were disparagingly referred to as ‘coconuts’). Tomiwa Owolade has obviously hit a sweet spot in the timing of his new book, This is not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter, for even the BBC and The Guardian (review by Colin Grant) appear to concede that he does have a point. One still has to ask, I’m afraid, if this book would have received such a favourable reception had it been written by someone without ‘lived experience’ i.e a white author.
The insidious imposition of group think on our population has reached into all corners of our society, from the NHS, though the Civil Service and Parliament to the banks, the army and publishing. Those who do not go along with the consensus or whose views are not of the moment, are sacked, cancelled, made subject to ‘trigger warnings’ (applied to the dead as well as the living) or essentially refused participation in society. In the NHS nurses or other employees who have questioned the line that ‘people of any gender can give birth’ have had their lives made impossible. Over the last year there has been a number of cases where employees have been placed under investigation by their employers or workplace because of their opposition to attempts to replace biological sex with self-identified gender ideologies (eg barrister Allison Bailey). Stonewall, which used to campaign on behalf of the gay community and has since transmogrified into a charity for the trans community, has been behind a lot of this workplace brainwashing. The organisation, which presumably would have outlived its original purpose once same-sex marriage had passed into law, has since become an aggressive force for workplace education on diversity, equity and inclusion. As Allison Pearson pointed out in her article on the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket (ICEC) report on racism in English cricket,
‘Equity is not to be confused with its more mature and likeable elder sibling, equality. Equity means imposing a quota on any given situation regardless of merit or competence. In the US, equity has seen high-scoring Asian students barred from college admissions to make room for black students who didn’t make the grade’.
Dr Kelvin Wright, a colonel in the Army Reserve, recently claimed he was forced out of the army following an investigation into whether he had failed to comply with the Army’s ‘values and standards’. The investigation followed his uploading onto his Facebook page a quote from the gender-critical journalist Helen Joyce that said: “If women cannot stand in a public place and say ‘men cannot be women’, then we do not have women’s rights at all.” The Free Speech Union is supporting Col Wright and has called for the Army to apologise.
Civil Servant, Anna Thomas, employed by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) recently, also with the help of the Free Speech Union, was awarded £100,000 for wrongful dismissal. Her ‘crime’ was to call out the department over their promotion of Critical Race Theory, which she claimed was inappropriate and contrary to the requirement for the Civil Service to be impartial.
Earlier this week, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (IPSO) ruled on Jeremy Clarkson’s tongue-in-cheek column about Meghan Markle in The Sun, written some months ago, and declared it sexist. That Clarkson should have been blunt in his opinions was hardly of itself a matter for comment. The fact that IPSO should be ruling on it was. As Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, wrote in his excellent appraisal of IPSO’s judgment, the Organisation has gone beyond its remit in pronouncing on the matter at all. IPSO, founded in 2014, is funded by the Regulatory Funding Company, in turn funded by its member publishers. It is governed by a charter which sets out its relationship with member publishers, one of the tenets of which is that complaints from activists are rejected on principle. Fraser Nelson explains clearly how and why this works. In the Clarkson case, the Twitterstorm which resulted from Clarkson’s jokey comment about Markle and the 60 MPs who were also baying for punishment somehow led to IPSO abandoning its founding charter and unilaterally extending its remit. Clarkson’s comments were opinion and, as Nelson points out, he and other editors will be seeking clarity from IPSO and if necessary, ‘respectfully disengage’. Once again, it seems that those who govern appear to be in the business of censoring those opinions with which they disagree.
This week’s other disconcerting news concerns banks. The right to hold one’s money in a bank account would appear to be an essential part of modern life. As we hurtle towards the disappearance of cash and Government and Bank of England backing the idea of a digital pound, we are increasingly at the mercy of the banks. The right to have a bank account should therefore, one would imagine, be a basic citizen’s right. Unfortunately, in this country, that does not appear to be the case if the bank disapproves of your opinions or political views. Nigel Farage and a vicar are both, it seems, victims of banks’ disapproval. In neither case was a clear reason given, although in the case of the vicar, the Reverend Richard Fothergill, the closure of his account by Yorkshire Building Society, followed a complaint about the promotion of trans ideology and Nigel Farage suggests in his case it was due to his political profile, although he does also admit he may not have sufficient funds to keep his Coutts account. Whatever the truth of the matter, and it seems that Jeremy Hunt is proposing to investigate the situation generally, the idea that our banks should have the right to cut us off from the modern world for not sharing their views and opinions is a terrifying one. It smacks of Communist China, where citizens acquire social credits for conformity and lose them for being in any way out of line.
The problem we now face is that almost the entire population seems to think that every issue, every problem is for the Government to deal with. The state is increasingly looked at to provide solutions and regulation for everything. Price of food too high; the government should pass regulations, mortgages too expensive; a government problem; savings interest not high enough; that’s for the Government to put right; no-one to look after Granny; well, ‘they’ should be doing something about it and so on. We can get rid of this pretty useless Conservative Government and as things are going, almost certainly will in a year’s time. Unfortunately, as the country is already bankrupt and no-one really wants to work anymore, more socialism really isn’t going to be the answer. There will be too few people to pay the taxes necessary for all those wonderful things the Labour party are going to do when they get into power. Certainly those with the real money and ability to leave will have gone and the middle classes are feeling increasingly impoverished and despairing. How on earth can they further their careers when they are white and middle-class and in many cases with the ‘wrong’ views? Combine all this with the wider problems of humanity and the future does not look bright. Of course, this feeling of impending doom might be dispelled if some things change over the next year. Perhaps we should be looking back at history and ‘Taking the Long View’, to use the title of the BBC programme. The question is, have we been here before, or are Gen Z right in thinking that the problems we face are entirely new? We might need some of that resilience for which the Brits use to be famed. Unfortunately there appears little evidence that there is much of it around.
Cover page image: music4life / pixabay / FreeIMG / Creative Commons
